And if Windows XP is running my kidney dialysis, or controlling my nuclear power station?

Inventing something that might set me up for life, never need to do anything ever again? Sounds like a good spur for innovation to me.

You want some of that? Then invent something that's more "gold" than mine. Another spur.

If I don't want you making my "gold" obsolete, robbing me of my easy profits/retirement? Then maybe I better keep innovating myself. Yet another spur.

Not saying its perfect, but it works.

In all seriousness, this isn't a personal hygene snark, I don't see how 8 minutes showering a week could be considered such a massive hardship.

Say you shower every second day, you're not going to be the freshest thing on Mars, but you'll not stink that bad. So that gives you a little over two and a quarter minutes to get a wash. No time to luxuriate. But plenty time to get clean if you get on with it.

Yup. That's the ultimate disapproval of homeopathy. At the levels of dilution involved, every single drop of water on the planet is likely to have "inherited" the magical healing of every possible substance on the planet that has ever gotten wet. So every random sample of water cures everything.

And that's before you even consider the goofy logic that determines which original substance cures which disease.

The only way homeopathy can counter this is to suggest that its the special way that the water is shaken between dilutions that makes all the difference. Because practitioners of homeopathy are skilled in shaking bottles of water in a way that makes a difference at molecular level.

You are absolutely correct, but for the wrong reasons. You have the chain of required events backwards.

It is no-one's responsibility to prove that alternative medicine does not work. It is alternative's medicine's responsibility to prove that is does work.

Why, you almost make it seem reasonable. What right thinking person could have any problem with this troll taking a few pennies of you for doing absolutely nothing? Its not so much to ask for, is it?

Certainly not worth getting slapped with court action simply because you have "principles". Just pay little money and nothing bad will happen to your nice little podcast. It would be a shame if you had to stop. Think of it just like extortion... , I mean, a tax. There, not so bad, was it?

During any price negotiations, the company wants to best maximise their profit. Any inside info they have on you will be used to their benefit, not yours. It skews negotiations in their favor, because you don't have the same inside knowledge on them.

All from just looking at your face before you even open your mouth.

What message are you hoping to "get through"? All you'd be conveying is "We think you are a bad person, so we are going to do bad things to you".

Yes, at the basest of levels, vengeance might make victims, or friends of the victim, feel better. But is this the only way?

You are blind to the fact that this is not a matter of going online to facebook. This is the reverse. This is the point where facebook starts coming to you. In real life. In the street, at the airport, in the store, at the dentist. And it'll know you, not necessarily because you've told it, but because all your acquaintances have.

Facebook will pass that information on to the airport/store/hospital because they'll pay to know who you are before you even approach the counter. "So they can better serve you."

Unfortunately when you are dealing will phone apps you have to deal with two things;

Firstly a continual stream of minor updates. Are you going to test every single one? Personally I have a life, and am not intent on being a beta tester for most of it.

Secondly, automated updates. Again, I don't want to spend half of my free time performing manual updates. So often allowing automatic updates is the only solution.

But yes, there is nothing more annoying to discover that the latest version is broken in some regard, and you would be better off with the older version, which is now unobtainable.

Same goes for applications that have bloated to the point where what used to be functional on your moderately aged phone, is now unusable because it has been coded and tested on the very latest hardware.

If you're immortal, then this already is paradise and hell.

This is very true. And you don't even have to be gifted to suffer from it.

I was not a "gifted" child, merely above average. Yet I can still recall the horror of classes taken by teachers who insisted that everyone progressed at the same speed as the slowest pupil. So I'd be forced to sit idle while listening to something being explained to the entire class, something that many of us had already successfully mastered. I was bored stupid, hated the teacher, and not progressing at the rate I was capable of. My exam results reflected that.

Except we did read it, and most likely reached the same conclusion. He's got next to nothing, but hopes that darkly hinting at future revelations of much worse will fool us into taking him more seriously than he deserves.

If you're going to have a series of revelations about anything, best start with one that doesn't have people saying "meh".

Well just like the star naming scam, no-one "gets to decide" and anyone can name anything they like.

I could rename the craters of Mars after my relatives if I wanted to. Yes, even the ones that already have names. No-one, however, is likely to pay my naming the slightest bit of attention, because I have neither authority nor importance. Just like UWingo.

The International Astronomical Union, on the otherhand, have a fair degree of recognition. Feel free to ignore them, but you'll find that most people concerned with Mars are happy for them to take the lead on naming.

I imagine that using buzzwords like "crowdsourced" means we're not supposed to spot that this is just a way of fleecing people of money for a totally worthless certificate.

Maybe the cause is good. But this method of fundraising is just sleazy.